Gearfuse Technology, Science, Culture & More

The information-design authority Edward Tufte is selling his multimillion-dollar collection of rare books, which together make up a "Museum of Cognitive Art." For most of us, the slideshow will have to do.

A new network protocol offers a surprising way to make messages travel more efficiently.

"An idiolect is a language (or some part or aspect of a language) that can be characterized exhaustively in terms of intrinsic properties of some single person, the person whose idiolect it is."

The SRZero goes from 0 to 60 in fewer than seven seconds. But this power doesn�t come from stepping on the gas�the race-ready automobile runs on electricity. And in a coup for green technology, tomorrow the car will reach Ushuaia, Argentina and the end of a 16,000-mile journey from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska.

To Kelly, the advance guard of the technium is to be found among the quadrillions of computer chips networked into vast electronic systems. But It may be difficult to discern whether the desires driving that process belong to technology, or are our own.

Talking about the new Facebook mail system at today�s live event, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook director of engineering Andrew �Boz� Bosworth keep using words like �simple, seamless, and informal.� But does the new system promote a dumbed-down version of sociability?

"Some flashes of lambent light, much like the aurora borealis, were first observed on the northern part of the heavens....as soon as the meteor emerged from behind the cloud, its light was prodigious."

The ease with which the Microsoft Kinect can be torn down�and the familiarity of the software driving it�has quickly proven a feature and not a bug for hackers. Hacking commercial gadgets is nothing new of course; but the pace at which hacks now appear, as well as the appeal they generate, is something to watch.

"Data envelops and surrounds a newborn in a neonatal ward, forming a protective shell/blanket/mobile�we might even think of it as bathwater. It's magical no, wait, it's science!"

The Red Planet has been the object of science fiction, paranoia, and fakery. And with numerous spacecraft now beaming back publicly-available images from our neighboring planet, Martian fantasizing is a growth industry. This film is one of the most convincing, and it isn't even from Mars. Video after the jump.